These are dark days for the police force. A comprehensive spending review that outlined a 20% cut in the central government police funding grant for all 43 forces in England and Wales by 2014/15. Up to 34,000 jobs to be cut in the next four years, an 11% cut in the number of constables: a figure that research claims could lead to a 3% rise in property crime alone. A crisis in management that has claimed the scalps of the Met chief and the UK’s top counter-terrorism officer. Two Independent Police Complaints Commission investigations into corruption, and calls from the home secretary for a third inquiry into ethical considerations. Claims that the law is being used to undermine peaceful protest. On and on it goes.

But let your hearts not be downcast, noble bobbies! Lost in Showbiz is delighted to inform you that help is at hand, in the comely shape of Miss Katie Price, who this week gave an interview in which she outlined what she called her dream: “to go to really dark prisons where you see rapists, paedophiles, Hannibal Lecters, murderers, and get inside their brains. Harold Shipman, Dennis Nilsen, Ted Bundy and Rose and Fred West, I’ve read about them all in detail,” she continued. “I’m obsessed. I just love the idea of finding out what happened to them in the past to make them do what they did. I’d love to be a detective – that would be my dream job, and autopsies, anything about that.”

What an image to conjure up: Jordan conducting an autopsy, perhaps pulling her trademark “sexy wink” face for the Sky Living camera crew as she cuts through the bronchus and hilum in order to remove a murder victim’s lung. There are those who will doubtless claim this is merely a means of drawing attention to her latest novel – “I’ve never lied about the fact that I don’t physically write my books” – but the journalist who interviewed her is convinced “her obsession with the dark side is relentless”. And so is Lost in Showbiz. It likes to imagine Price living her dream, conducting undercover investigations, slipping from one location to another like a ghost, unnoticed in her neon pink Swarovski crystal-covered Range Rover and matching horsebox. It likes to imagine her combing through the awful saga of Nilsen – the men he picked up in bars, the murders and dismemberments, the retaining of corpses for sexual purposes – then applying the keenness of her psychoanalytical mind to the case: debating whether or not there’s a relationship between the so-called unmetabolised “death constellation” – indigestible, uncontained experience dealing with death or its equivalents – and planned murder, or whether a more Kleinian perspective, such as Herbert Rosenfeld’s concept of destructive narcissism, might be helpful in understanding Nilsen’s actions. It then pictures her coming to the same conclusion that her current beau, Leandro Penna, recently arrived at on Twitter about his predecessor Alex Reid: “what a weird freak gay”.

“I’d actually like to go to a murder scene and try and work out what’s happened,” she said. “I actually looked into how to be a detective once, but you have to join the police force first.” As Lost in Showbiz read those words, it felt its heart sink and its eyes involuntarily roll. Will the jobsworth bureaucracy of politically correct ‘elf-and-safety Britain never cease binding the hands of decent citizens with its red tape? Where will it get off with its pettifogging insistence that you need some kind of specialist training in order to investigate a murder? Did Sherlock Holmes have any formal training? Or Basil the Great Mouse Detective? Did Cadfael undergo two years as a uniformed officer then spend a further two years on the Initial Crime Investigators’ Development Programme?

Lost in Showbiz thinks not. Isn’t it time the civil service took a leaf out of the private sector’s book and allowed Katie Price to do whatever she wants – write books, sing, act etc – regardless of the fact that she appears to have no ability whatsoever to do them? Come on, Dave! You want an army of volunteers? Jordan wants to have a crack at psychoanalysing a serial killer and setting about a cadaver with a scalpel! The big society doesn’t get much bigger than that! Let’s get a bit of much-needed mammiferous glamour into the world of the forensic autopsy!

It’s not as if Jordan doesn’t have a long-standing interest in the world of law and order. Cast your mind back a couple of years to the happy day when she favoured the world with her views on crime and punishment. “The way I see it is an eye for an eye,” she said, “so if someone rapes a girl he should be bent over and the same thing done to him.” I know, I know: harsh but fair, like Judge Dredd only with massive breasts and his own range of horse rugs. “And if someone steals they should have to wear a dye on their skin, like across their face!” she continued, warming to her subject. “That would stop people stealing!”

Lost in Showbiz pays no heed to those who demand to know what foul crime Katie Price committed to warrant the livid orange dye she’s forced to sport across her face at all times, and instead respectfully hopes that whoever is responsible for appointing the next Met police commissioner is reading. Gentlemen, I think we’ve found the woman to restore our nation’s shattered faith in the force.

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About Marc Leprêtre

Marc Leprêtre is researcher in sociolinguistics, history and political science. Born in Etterbeek (Belgium), he lives in Barcelona (Spain) since 1982. He holds a PhD in History and a BA in Sociolinguistics. He is currently head of studies and prospective at the Centre for Contemporary Affairs (Government of Catalonia). Devoted Springsteen and Barça fan…